Here’s something else that Julian says that sounds paradoxical. God, she says, “never started to love mankind.” For the obvious reason that if God “started” to love us there was a time prior when God had not loved us. Therefore, God never started to love us as He has always loved us. As Julian succinctly puts it, “Before ever He made us, He loved us.”
In the act of Creation, God had to take a leap of faith - had to commit to the outcome, so to speak. Thus the Cosmos was born from Divine Love. There was no other way. A hint as to why that might be comes from Computer Science, strange as that might sound. Any 'simulation' sufficiently detailed to know the outcome in advance of the act itself, would be identical to the Cosmos. God had to trust in God that God could handle whatever the Creation might do. Berdyayev's Meonic freedom means there was always going to be surprises even for God along the way.
Do you think God is impassive in general? Is God impassive to joy as well as to anger? Or does God feel the good stuff only and not the bad?
Or say I do something injurious to a friend, something that really makes that friend feel bad. Does God compassionately and empathetically feel the suffering of my friend too, just not any anger at me for having does something awful? Does God feel sorrow for me too because I let myself be corrupted enough to treat a fellow human being badly?
My sense, totally speculative, of course, is that God feels it all, the good, the bad, and the ugly (and Bible stories seem to illustrate this). But God chooses to forgive everything because God knows that, in the long run, the only way for everything to work out and usher in a perfect community of every soul ever created (human, animal, alien being) is if we all learn to practice self-giving love no matter what and perfect forgiveness no matter what. So God does that now and hopes we will all come to it eventually.
I actually wrote about this recently (post timestamped for late July) thinking through how John Mark Comer handles God's emotions in his book God Has a Name. Short take here. I think the word "impassive" is just poorly chosen. In the patristic world, "passions" were negative. Passions mean unrest, agitation, craving. And God just isn't like that. God isn't agitated, triggered, or craving. But we hear the word "impassive" and think "emotionally blank." But God is Love. Not as an emotion, but as Love Itself. Along with Peace and Joy. God is FULL of that goodness. The key point is that God's Love, Peace, and Joy are not triggered, variable, reactive, or contingent upon our actions. There's not an if/then relation at work: If I do X, God will feel Y. That's what "impassive" is supposed to rule out, not God's Love, Peace, or Joy but the reactive element, the agitated aspect.
The way I like to think about it is this: God is Love, Peace, and Joy, but that Love, Peace, and Joy is Tranquility. God is like the sunlight, to borrow Jesus' image, a patient and constant attention warming us with Love, Joy, and Peace. And yes, that love is "impassive" in that the Sun always shines and doesn't flicker on and off in response to my actions.
I love reading your posts. I've never commented before, so let me first say: thank you! For all of it. Your missives always enrich my heart.
I've been thinking about these exact things lately and I appreciate your clarification on what "impassive" means. I'm sure you will be touching on this in your later post, but I'm wondering how you might reconcile Jesus's emotions with this idea of a tranquil God of Love, Peace, and Joy. I try to tell myself that pain and grief can be holy, since Christ felt them, while other emotions like bitterness and resentment are not... (he didn't feel those)... But perhaps these are the emotions of the human Jesus, perfected by the divine Jesus? I'm probably wading into a bigger question here! I know you have a wealth of posts on Substack and you've probably gone into this elsewhere... Sorry if I've missed it.
I think this is right. Of course we anthropomorphize God. How could we not? Not that God isn’t “personal”—he is, but He’s also everything, which we cannot comprehend.
A Course In Miracles is right on, here. The Course realizes that the critical spirit of sin, attack, judgment, etc. clouds our seeing in its entirety, that the solution is in choosing (tough word, I know) another Way, a Grace Way which leavens our being.
There is much language in the biblical text around the apprehension of a new sense of seeing and hearing after the Cross has had its way with us.
We really are born anew. Until then we’ll merely “work” harder at all of this, versus a sort of allowing—allowing God’s love to be our heuristic; love being about boundaries, and again, not “works.”
We are perhaps never more vulnerable to the lure of being a Super Christian than after our conversion, as we see with Jesus’ temptation by Satan after his conversion. Good luck with that!
I think your commentary about ACIM was spot on and ACIM as the Bible does, is always encouraging us to simply show a little willingness to "follow Jesus". Think this is what you call "allowing"?
I love this theological interpretation so much. Julian of Norwich’s Revelations was one of the books that opened my heart to Christ and conversion. But I don’t know how to reconcile this view with stories like the rich man and Lazarus in Luke. Do you have any thoughts to help me understand better? Thank you.
Combining this post with yesterday's post is one way to answer. That is, when the Rich Man finds himself exposed to God's light he experiences "the dark night in an eschatological key." He finds himself in pain, darkness, and cast far away from God. Not because God is actively hurting him, but simply because that is how a soul like his is going to experience an encounter with God.
But really, Jesus' parable isn't a speculation about the afterlife. I think we misread it if we pour over it like tea leaves, trying to peer into the afterlife. The story is a prophetic warning about our mistreatment of the poor. The agenda is ethical, not eschatological. While we speculate about the afterlife in talking about this story Jesus taps us on the shoulder and says, "Seriously? I told that story to get you to notice the Lazarus at your own gate."
I think we best know God through Jesus. So I ask myself, “What do I see Jesus doing?” Did he forgive? Was he angry? Frustrated? Disappointed? I can easily point out examples of Jesus “feeling” all of these emotions. One might respond with “That’s God in the flesh and He is not ‘in the flesh’”. I wouldn’t be comfortable saying God is “triggered”, for sure. Yet, I know He isn’t stoic either.
Also, on how God doesn’t “need” anything to forgive: what do we do then with Hebrews saying “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness”?
This post, and the last, bring up a lot to think about.
Yeah, OK. The real problem here is that humans are evil pieces of satan apart from God. There's no connection with God who is Love because humans are so horrific that those who reject the Lord are literally the equal of satan.
The issue is that we are separated from God as much as darkness is separated from light without the blood of Jesus cleansing us from our sin.
No, God does not have any sin in Him. He is Good. He is Divine Love.
But we are evil. We are big bags of hate apart from God.
Now, the devil cannot recognize he is evil. He thinks he is the equal of God. But he's not. His sense of equality with God and his denial of his own evil is his state of blasphemy.
He could theorize that God doesn't need to forgive him.
But what the devil needs to recognize (and cannot) is that he is literal hell in spirit. He's blasphemed the Holy Spirit so he can only theorize that he is already forgiven, not recognizing how evil he is.
Here’s something else that Julian says that sounds paradoxical. God, she says, “never started to love mankind.” For the obvious reason that if God “started” to love us there was a time prior when God had not loved us. Therefore, God never started to love us as He has always loved us. As Julian succinctly puts it, “Before ever He made us, He loved us.”
In the act of Creation, God had to take a leap of faith - had to commit to the outcome, so to speak. Thus the Cosmos was born from Divine Love. There was no other way. A hint as to why that might be comes from Computer Science, strange as that might sound. Any 'simulation' sufficiently detailed to know the outcome in advance of the act itself, would be identical to the Cosmos. God had to trust in God that God could handle whatever the Creation might do. Berdyayev's Meonic freedom means there was always going to be surprises even for God along the way.
Do you think God is impassive in general? Is God impassive to joy as well as to anger? Or does God feel the good stuff only and not the bad?
Or say I do something injurious to a friend, something that really makes that friend feel bad. Does God compassionately and empathetically feel the suffering of my friend too, just not any anger at me for having does something awful? Does God feel sorrow for me too because I let myself be corrupted enough to treat a fellow human being badly?
My sense, totally speculative, of course, is that God feels it all, the good, the bad, and the ugly (and Bible stories seem to illustrate this). But God chooses to forgive everything because God knows that, in the long run, the only way for everything to work out and usher in a perfect community of every soul ever created (human, animal, alien being) is if we all learn to practice self-giving love no matter what and perfect forgiveness no matter what. So God does that now and hopes we will all come to it eventually.
I actually wrote about this recently (post timestamped for late July) thinking through how John Mark Comer handles God's emotions in his book God Has a Name. Short take here. I think the word "impassive" is just poorly chosen. In the patristic world, "passions" were negative. Passions mean unrest, agitation, craving. And God just isn't like that. God isn't agitated, triggered, or craving. But we hear the word "impassive" and think "emotionally blank." But God is Love. Not as an emotion, but as Love Itself. Along with Peace and Joy. God is FULL of that goodness. The key point is that God's Love, Peace, and Joy are not triggered, variable, reactive, or contingent upon our actions. There's not an if/then relation at work: If I do X, God will feel Y. That's what "impassive" is supposed to rule out, not God's Love, Peace, or Joy but the reactive element, the agitated aspect.
The way I like to think about it is this: God is Love, Peace, and Joy, but that Love, Peace, and Joy is Tranquility. God is like the sunlight, to borrow Jesus' image, a patient and constant attention warming us with Love, Joy, and Peace. And yes, that love is "impassive" in that the Sun always shines and doesn't flicker on and off in response to my actions.
Hi Richard -
I love reading your posts. I've never commented before, so let me first say: thank you! For all of it. Your missives always enrich my heart.
I've been thinking about these exact things lately and I appreciate your clarification on what "impassive" means. I'm sure you will be touching on this in your later post, but I'm wondering how you might reconcile Jesus's emotions with this idea of a tranquil God of Love, Peace, and Joy. I try to tell myself that pain and grief can be holy, since Christ felt them, while other emotions like bitterness and resentment are not... (he didn't feel those)... But perhaps these are the emotions of the human Jesus, perfected by the divine Jesus? I'm probably wading into a bigger question here! I know you have a wealth of posts on Substack and you've probably gone into this elsewhere... Sorry if I've missed it.
Blessings.
I think this is right. Of course we anthropomorphize God. How could we not? Not that God isn’t “personal”—he is, but He’s also everything, which we cannot comprehend.
A Course In Miracles is right on, here. The Course realizes that the critical spirit of sin, attack, judgment, etc. clouds our seeing in its entirety, that the solution is in choosing (tough word, I know) another Way, a Grace Way which leavens our being.
There is much language in the biblical text around the apprehension of a new sense of seeing and hearing after the Cross has had its way with us.
We really are born anew. Until then we’ll merely “work” harder at all of this, versus a sort of allowing—allowing God’s love to be our heuristic; love being about boundaries, and again, not “works.”
We are perhaps never more vulnerable to the lure of being a Super Christian than after our conversion, as we see with Jesus’ temptation by Satan after his conversion. Good luck with that!
I think your commentary about ACIM was spot on and ACIM as the Bible does, is always encouraging us to simply show a little willingness to "follow Jesus". Think this is what you call "allowing"?
I love this theological interpretation so much. Julian of Norwich’s Revelations was one of the books that opened my heart to Christ and conversion. But I don’t know how to reconcile this view with stories like the rich man and Lazarus in Luke. Do you have any thoughts to help me understand better? Thank you.
Combining this post with yesterday's post is one way to answer. That is, when the Rich Man finds himself exposed to God's light he experiences "the dark night in an eschatological key." He finds himself in pain, darkness, and cast far away from God. Not because God is actively hurting him, but simply because that is how a soul like his is going to experience an encounter with God.
But really, Jesus' parable isn't a speculation about the afterlife. I think we misread it if we pour over it like tea leaves, trying to peer into the afterlife. The story is a prophetic warning about our mistreatment of the poor. The agenda is ethical, not eschatological. While we speculate about the afterlife in talking about this story Jesus taps us on the shoulder and says, "Seriously? I told that story to get you to notice the Lazarus at your own gate."
That’s very helpful, thank you!
I think we best know God through Jesus. So I ask myself, “What do I see Jesus doing?” Did he forgive? Was he angry? Frustrated? Disappointed? I can easily point out examples of Jesus “feeling” all of these emotions. One might respond with “That’s God in the flesh and He is not ‘in the flesh’”. I wouldn’t be comfortable saying God is “triggered”, for sure. Yet, I know He isn’t stoic either.
Also, on how God doesn’t “need” anything to forgive: what do we do then with Hebrews saying “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness”?
This post, and the last, bring up a lot to think about.
Yeah, OK. The real problem here is that humans are evil pieces of satan apart from God. There's no connection with God who is Love because humans are so horrific that those who reject the Lord are literally the equal of satan.
The issue is that we are separated from God as much as darkness is separated from light without the blood of Jesus cleansing us from our sin.
No, God does not have any sin in Him. He is Good. He is Divine Love.
But we are evil. We are big bags of hate apart from God.
Now, the devil cannot recognize he is evil. He thinks he is the equal of God. But he's not. His sense of equality with God and his denial of his own evil is his state of blasphemy.
He could theorize that God doesn't need to forgive him.
But what the devil needs to recognize (and cannot) is that he is literal hell in spirit. He's blasphemed the Holy Spirit so he can only theorize that he is already forgiven, not recognizing how evil he is.